Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mud Vein (2014)

  We quench our worry with futile trying; trying to break the windows, trying to open the front door, trying to not lose our minds. We are so exhausted from trying that we stare at things … for hours at a time: a drawing of two sparrows that hangs in the living room, the bright red toaster, the keypad at the front door which is the portal to our freedom. Isaac stares at the snow more than anything else. He stands at the sink and looks out the window where it falls slowly. On day four I am so tired of staring at things that I ask Isaac about his wife. I notice that his wedding ring is missing, and I wonder if he took it off, or if they did. Almost instinctively his fingers reach for the ghost of the ring. ‘They’ took it off, I think. We are sitting at the kitchen table, our breakfast of oatmeal recently consumed. My nails—bitten down to the quick—are stinging. He’s just commented on how large and awkward the table is: a big, round block of wood supported by a circular base thicker than two tree trunks. Initially he looks alarmed that I’ve asked. Then something breaks open in his eyes. He doesn’t have time to hide it. I see every last speck of emotion, and it hurts me. “She’s an oncologist,” he says. I nod, my mouth dry. That’s a good fit for him. “What’s her name?” I already know her name. “Daphne” he says. Daphne Akela. “We’ve been married for two years. You met her once.” Yes, I remember. He scratches his head, right above his ear, then smooths what he’s disturbed with the heel of his hand. “What would Daphne be doing right now … with you missing?” I ask, folding my legs underneath me. He clears his throat. “She’s a mess, Senna.” It’s a matter-of-fact statement with an obvious answer. I don’t know why I asked, except to be cruel. No one is looking for me, except maybe the media. Bestselling Author Vanishes. Isaac has people. People who love him. “What about you?” he says, turning it on me. “Are you married?” I tug on my grey, wind it around my finger, slide it behind my ear. “Do you really need to ask me that?” He laughs coldly. “No, I suppose not. Were you seeing anyone?” “Nope.” He folds in his lips, nods. He knows me, too … sort of. “What happened to—” I cut him off. “I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.” “Even after you wrote the book?” I put my crusty oatmeal spoon in my mouth and suck off the hardened oats. “Even after the book,” I say, not meeting his eyes. I want to ask if he read it, but I’m too chicken.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Night was closing: it was almost beyond my power to move; I was scarcely able to stand erect; I cast my eyes upon the thicket where four years earlier I had slept a night when I had been in circumstances almost as unhappy! I dragged myself along as best I could, and having reached the very same spot, tormented by my still bleeding wounds, overwhelmed by my mind's anxieties and the sorrows of my heart, I passed the cruelest night imaginable. By dawn, thanks to my youth and my vigorous temperament, some of my strength was restored; greatly terrified by the proximity of that baneful chateau, I started away from it without delay; I left the forest, and resolved at any price to gain the first habitation which might catch my eye, I entered the town of Saint-Marcel, about five leagues distant from Paris; I demanded the address of a surgeon, one was given me; I presented myself and besought him to dress my wounds; I told him that, in connection with some affair at whose source lay love, I had fled my mother's house, quit Paris, and during the night had been overtaken in the forest by bandits who in revenge for my resistance to their desires, had set their dogs upon me. Rodin, as this artist was called, examined me with the greatest attention, found nothing dangerous about my injuries; had I come to him directly, he said, he would have been able to guarantee that in the space of a fortnight he would have me as fresh and whole as I had been before my adventure; however, the night passed in the open and my worry had infected my wounds, and I could not expect to be well in less than a month. Rodin found space in his own house to lodge me, took all possible care of me, and on the thirtieth day there no longer existed upon my body a single vestige of Monsieur de Bressac's cruelties. As soon as I was fit to take a little air, my first concern was to find in the town some girl sufficiently adroit and intelligent to go to the Marquise's chateau and find out what had taken place there since my departure. This apparently very dangerous inquisitiveness would without the slightest doubt have been exceedingly misplaced; but here it was not a question of mere Curiosity. What I had earned while with the Marquise remained in my room; I had scarcely six louis about me, and I possessed above forty at the chateau.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  David Koresh created such a community in the Branch Davidian compound that he established near Waco and aptly called Ranch Apocalypse. In 1993, I was asked to write about the siege that was then under way. I decided not to, because there were more reporters on the scene than Branch Davidians; however, I had been unsettled by the sight of the twenty-one children that Koresh sent out of the compound shortly before the fatal inferno. Those children left behind their parents and the only life they had known. They were ripped out of the community of faith, placed in government vans, and ushered through a curtain of federal agents and reporters onto the stage of an alien world and who knows what future. I thought there must be other children who had experienced similar traumas; what had become of them? There is a strangely contorted mound in a cemetery in Oakland, California, close by the naval hospital where Hubbard spent his last months in uniform. Under an undistinguished headstone rest four hundred bodies out of the more than nine hundred followers of Jim Jones who perished in Jonestown in 1978. The caskets had been stacked on top of one another on the side of a bulldozed hillside, then the earth was filled in, grass was planted, and the tragedy of Jonestown was buried in the national memory as one more inexplicable religious calamity. The members of the Peoples Temple, as Jones called his movement, had been drawn to his Pentecostal healing services, his social activism, and his racial egalitarianism. Charisma and madness were inextricably woven into the fabric of his personality, along with an insatiable sexual appetite that accompanied Jones’s terror of abandonment. In his search for a secure religious community, Jones had repeatedly uprooted his congregation. Finally, in May 1977, the entire movement disappeared, virtually overnight. Without warning, leaving jobs and homes and family members who were not a part of the Peoples Temple, they were spirited away to a jungle encampment in Guyana, South America, which Jones billed as a socialist paradise. There he began to school them in suicide. I learned that not everyone had died in Jonestown. Among the survivors were Jones’s three sons: Stephan, Tim, and Jim Junior. They had been away from the camp playing basketball against the Guyanese national team in the capital city of Georgetown. These haunted young men had never before told their stories. One of the privileges of being a journalist is to be trusted to hear such memories in all their emotional complexity. One night I went to dinner with Tim Jones and his wife, Lorna. Tim was physically powerful, able to press a hundred pounds with either arm, but he couldn’t fly on an airplane because of his panic attacks. He wanted his wife to come along because he had never given her a full account, and he wanted to be in a public place so he wouldn’t cry.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I was not a smell person. It was my least favorite sense. I didn’t light candles, or wander into a bakery, drawn in by the scent of the bread. Smell was just another sense that I wrestled into my white room. I didn’t use it, I didn’t care about it. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. But … I was going to miss Isaac’s smell. Isaac was smell. That was his sense. He smelled like spices and the hospital. I could smell his skin, too. He just had to be a few feet away from me and I could catch the smell of his skin. “Isaac.” My voice was full of conviction, but when he turned to face me, hands in pockets, I didn’t know what to say. We stared at each other. It was awful. It was painful. “Senna, what do you want?” I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music. “I don’t know.” He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to. “Senna…” He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another. His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone. “Goodbye, Isaac.” I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything. Seven days after he walked backwards out of my house I went to the mailbox and on my way back, found a CD on my windshield. I clutched it to my chest for an hour before I slipped it into my stereo. It was an intense crescendo of lyrics and drums and harp and everything he was feeling—and I was, too. The most remarkable thing was that I was feeling.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Detective Garrison chooses that exact moment to come back. I want more time with her. I want more answers, but I know my time is up. He leads me to the door by my elbow. I look back at Saphira. She’s staring into space, serene. “He would have died without you, too,” she says before the door closes. I want to ask her what she means, but the door swings closed. And that is the last time I ever see Saphira Elgin alive. Detective Garrison is kind. I think this case is above his pay grade. He’s not sure what to do with me—so he tries to feed me doughnuts and sandwiches. I eat none of it, but I appreciate the sentiment. There are six people in the room with me; two of them leaning against the wall, the others sitting. I give them my statement. I tell a tape recorder what the last fourteen months looked like; each day, each hunger pain, each time I thought one of us would die. When I am finished the room is quiet. Detective Garrison is the first to clear his throat. That’s when I dare ask about Isaac. I’ve been too afraid up until now. Thinking his name alone hurts me. Hearing someone speak about him feels … wrong. He’s been with me for all this time. Now he’s not. “Dr. Elgin got him over the Canadian border and took him to a hospital in Victoria. Took him is an ambitious word,” he says. “She dropped him outside the Emergency room and drove off. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours before he finally started to come out of it. He grabbed a nurse by the arm and managed to say your name. The nurse recognized your name right away due to the media buzz you caused when you disappeared. She notified the police. By the time they got there Isaac was able to talk. He told them you were in a cabin somewhere near a cliff, but couldn’t give them much more than that.” I am quiet. “So he’s okay?” “Yes, he is. He’s with his family in Seattle.” That hurts and brings me relief. I wonder what it was like meeting his baby for the first time. “How did she do it? Get both of us to that house? Cross borders? She must have had help.” He shakes his head. “We are still questioning her. She took Isaac to the hospital in an RV. She was in the same RV when she tried to cross the border back into Alaska. When they searched her vehicle they found a false floorboard with a space large enough to hold two bodies. We think she drugged you and put you both in there. We don’t know anything about help, we’re still questioning her.” “Back into Alaska?” I ask. “She was coming back for me?” He shakes his head. “We don’t know.” I slam my fist on the table, frustrated. “What do you know?”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know, and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets supine. Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without interruption, and finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult enough to understand his English when he’s under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer… no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he manages to get out clearly. Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to pretend that he is going blind.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Whilst I stood thus stupid and mute, which she doubtless attributed to nothing more than a concern at parting, this idea procured me perhaps a slight alleviation of it, in the following harangue: “That now we were got safe to London, and that she was obliged to go to her place, she advised me by all means to get into one as soon as possible; that I need not fear getting one; there were more places than parish-churches; that she advised me to go to an intelligence office; that if she heard of any thing stirring, she would find me out and let me know; that in the meantime, I should take a private lodging, and acquaint her where to send to me; that she wished me good luck, and hoped I should always have the grace to keep myself honest, and not bringing a disgrace on my parentage.” With this; she took her leave of me, and left me, as it were, on my own hands, full as lightly as I had been put into hers. Left thus alone, absolutely destitute and friendless I began then to feel most bitterly the severity of this separation, the scene of which had passed in a little room in the inn; and no sooner was her back turned, but the affliction I felt at my helpless strange circumstances, burst out into a flood of tears, which infinitely relieved the oppression of my heart; though I still remained stupified, and most perfectly perplexed how to dispose of myself. One of the drawers coming in, added yet more to my uncertainty, by asking me, in a short way, if I called for anything? to which I replied innocently: “No.” But I wished him to tell me where I might get a lodging for that night. He said he would go and speak to his mistress, who accordingly came, and told me drily, without entering in the least into the distress she saw me in, that I might have a bed for a shilling, and that, as she supposed I had some friends in town (there I fetched a deep sigh in vain!), I might provide for myself in the morning. It is incredible what trifling consolations the human mind will seize in its greatest afflictions. The assurance of nothing more than a bed to lie on that night, calmed my agonies; and being ashamed to acquaint the mistress of the inn that I had no friends to apply to in town, I proposed to myself to proceed, the very next morning, to an intelligence office, to which I was furnished with written directions on the back of a ballad, Esther had given me.

• From Between Us

  This is the pattern that Wang finds time and again for U.S. American mothers that she studies: These mothers help their children figure out how their emotions relate to what they want or think. They help them to focus on, and articulate, their insides. Not so for Chinese mothers in Qi Wang’s studies: rather than helping their children understand the reason they feel in a certain way, these mothers focus on the social consequences of their behavior much more so than the American mothers. Take little Jiang’s mom, who reminds her child of a time he got mad also. It was the night before, when Jiang started crying because his mom and grandma had not let him watch TV. Rather than dwelling on his feelings, Jiang’s mom asks: “Do you know why we didn’t let you watch TV?” Jiang promptly gives her the reason: “You are worried that my eyes would get hurt. I wanted to watch ‘Chao-Tian-Men.’ I was mad. I insisted on watching it.” Jiang’s mom responds not by relating to Jiang’s feelings or preferences, but by reminding him of the social consequence of his protest: “So you got spanked, right?” she asks. Jiang nods in acknowledgment. Many of the Chinese mothers in Qi Wang’s research use the emotional exchange to point out to their children what the right and wrong behavior is in a way the American mothers in that same research did not. Jiang’s mom points out that Jiang was wrong to protest her decision that he could not watch TV, and she reminds him of the negative social consequences. There are also mothers who use the exchange to point out the positive social consequences. Xuexue’s mom, for instance, uses the conversation to underline the virtue of her three-year-old’s emotional response—sadness in this case. “Xuexue is a good child. You understand that you made a mistake,” she says, after Xuexue acknowledged she was “very sad” upon fighting with her sisters because they would not let her pull the grass (something that was forbidden). Where American mothers helped their child to notice and understand their own feelings, Chinese mothers encourage their children to understand their emotions as acts with social consequences. American caregiving practices facilitate looking inward to the MINE emotions, and Chinese lead the attention outwards towards OURS emotions. The almost exclusive focus on emotional acts and their social consequences is certainly not limited to Chinese mothers. The anthropologist Andrew Beatty describes how on Java, Indonesia, adults use emotion words to describe how children should be acting, given the precise circumstances, rather than using these same words to refer to any feeling or mental state. For instance, they will use isin, “shame,” to indicate to a small child that they are expected to show inhibited and polite behavior in the presence of strangers or elders. Isin is not used to describe feelings, not even emotional behaviors (or “expressions”), but rather a norm for behavior given a certain set of circumstances.

• From Between Us

  Children would learn to pose, as well as answer, the kinds of questions presented in the Toolkit ( figure 8.1 ), above. By learning to unpack emotional episodes, students would be up to the task of bridging the gap between their school and home cultures. Unpacking emotions, and recognizing their diversity, would fit the growing call for “equity” in emotional literacy programs, not just by generally respecting others, but also by specifically allowing for cultural diversity in emotional and social competence itself. What is more, it will provide an opportunity to value the students (and increasingly, teachers) who have become facile in unpacking different ways of doing emotions, because they belong to more than one culture; we can recognize cultural fluency with a second culture as a desirable relationship skill itself. After all ways of doing emotions are made to count, we can be sure that schools and classrooms will find common ground. Are Emotions the Same Deep Down? Here I return to the question I asked at the beginning of this book: Is it true that we are all the same when it comes to feelings? Was the young Ta-Nehisi Coates simply angry , but in a situation that would not have prompted anger to those of us who are more privileged? What would be lost if we described Ahmet as simply ashamed in response to a situation that might have elicited indignation in his Belgian classmates—the teacher’s reprimand? Did Ramla really feel the same as her therapist Kaat Van Acker would have, had she been crying, but did her culture emphasize moral failure rather than a loss of abilities? Did the Simbo women feel love like Dureau, but simultaneously feel sadness ? These are good, legitimate questions to ask, as their answers allow us to resonate with the feelings of people growing up in different sociocultural contexts. These questions are where the unpacking of emotions should start, because this is where we can resonate. Yet, there is no reason to assume primacy of the ways emotions are done in Western middle-class contexts, and no reason to think that those ways are any more authentic or natural than other ways of doing emotions. There is no reason to assume that the English emotion lexicon cuts nature at its joints any more than other emotion lexicons do. We need to find out what is at stake in emotional episodes, what people perceive to be the emotion(s) during these episodes and what these emotions mean, and how emotional episodes connect people in a directional dance.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He took me inside. Picked me right up and carried me through the French doors and set me gently on the couch. I lay down and curled up, tucking my knees under my chin. He tossed a blanket over me and started a fire, then he disappeared into the kitchen and I could hear him moving around. When he came back he made me sit up handing me a mug of something hot. “Tea,” he said. He had a few pieces of cheese and a slice of homemade bread on a plate. I’d made the bread on Christmas Eve. Before. I pushed the plate away, but took the tea. He watched me drink it from his haunches. It was sweet. He waited for me to finish and took the cup. “You need to eat.” I shook my head. “Why are you here?” My voice was raspy—too much screaming. My white streak dangled in front of my eye, I tucked it and looked at the flames. “Because you are.” I didn’t know what he meant. Did he feel responsible for me because he found me? I lay back down and curled up. He sat on the floor in front of the couch where I was lying, facing the fire. I closed my eyes and slept. When I woke he was gone. I sat up and stared around the room. Light was creeping in through the kitchen window, which meant I’d slept straight through the night. I had no reference for what time he carried me inside. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and walked barefoot to the kitchen. Had he taken off my shoes after he carried me inside? I didn’t remember. I might not have been wearing shoes. There was fresh coffee in the pot and a clean mug sitting next to it. I picked up the mug and underneath he had left another card. Clever. He’d written something along the bottom. Call me if you need anything. Eat something. I crumpled the card in my fist and tossed it in the sink. “I won’t,” I said out loud. I turned on the faucet and let the water smear the words. I took a shower. Got dressed. Started another fire. Stared at the fire. I added a log. I stared at the fire. Around four o’clock I wandered into my office and sat behind my desk. My office was the most sterile room in the house. Most authors filled their writing space with warmth and color, pictures that inspire, chairs that allow them to think. My office consisted of a black lacquered desk in the center of an all white room: white walls, white ceiling, white tile. I needed emptiness to think, a clear white canvas to paint on. The black desk grounded me. Otherwise I’d just float around in all the white. Things distracted me. Or maybe they complicated me. I didn’t like to live with color. I wasn’t always like that. I learned to survive better.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  [image file=image29.jpg] I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No. It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come? Days, then a week, then two. Isaac gives me the silent treatment. And when there are only two people in the universe, silence is very, very loud. I lurk in his places: the kitchen, the carousel room where he sits against the wall and stares at the horses. I don’t sleep in the attic room anymore; I curl up downstairs on the sofa and wait. Wait for him to wake up, wait for him to look at me, wait for emotions to implode. One night I am sitting at the table … waiting … while he stands at the stove stirring something in a huge cast iron pot. We are running out of food. The freezer has seven plastic bags of indeterminate meat and about four pounds of frozen vegetables. All lima beans, which Isaac hates. The pantry is no less barren looking. We have one sack of potatoes and a two-pound bag of rice. There are some cans of ravioli, but I keep telling myself we will be out of here before I have to eat those. When he hands me my plate a few minutes later I try to catch his eyes, but they run from me. I push my plate away. The rim of my plate bumps against his. He looks up. “Why are you treating me like this? You can barely look at me.” I don’t expect him to answer. Maybe. “Do you remember how we met?” he asks. I get a chill. “How could I not?” He runs his tongue across his teeth before leaning away from his food. He’s certainly looking at me this time. “Do you want the story?” “I want to know why you can’t look at me,” I say. He rubs the tips of his fingers together as if to rub away grease. But there is no grease. We are eating dry rice with a little potato and ground beef mashed into it.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "She was fond of you, was she not?" "Yes, very; and so was I of her. Moreover—had I not been given to those propensities which I dared not avow to her, and which only tribades can understand; had I, like other men of my age, been living a merry life of fornication with whores, mistresses, and lively grisettes—I should often have made her the confidante of my erotic exploits, for in the moment of bliss our prodigal feelings are often blunted by the too great excess, whilst the remembrance doled out at our will is a real twofold pleasure of the senses and of the mind. "Teleny, however, had of late become a kind of bar between us, and I think she had got to be rather jealous of him, for his name seemed to have become as objectionable to her as it formerly had been to me." "Did she begin to suspect your liaison?" "I did not know whether she suspected it, or if she was beginning to be jealous of the affection I bore him. "Matters, however, were coming to a crisis, and were shaping towards the dreadful way in which they ended. "One day a grand concert was to be given at——, and L—— who was to play having been taken ill, Teleny was asked to take his place. It was an honour he could not refuse. "'I am loath to leave you,' said he, 'even for a day or two, for I know that just now you are so busy that you cannot possibly get away, especially as your manager is ill.' "'Yes,' said I, 'it is rather awkward, still I might——' "'No, no, it would be foolish; I'll not allow you.' "'But you know it is so long since you played at a concert where I was not present.' "You'll be present in mind if not in body. I shall see you sitting in your usual place, and I shall play for you and you alone. Besides, we have never been parted for any length of time—no, not for a single day since Briancourt's letter. Let us try and see if we can live apart for two days. Who knows? Perhaps, some time or other——' "'What do you mean?' "'Nothing, only you might get tired of this life. You might, like other men, marry just to have a family.' "'A family!' I burst out laughing. 'Is that encumbrance so very necessary to a man's happiness?' "'My love might surfeit you.' "'Réné, don't speak in that way! Could I live without you?' "He smiled incredulously. "'What! do you doubt my love?' "'Can I doubt that the stars are fire? but,' continued he, slowly, and looking at me, 'do you doubt mine?' "It seemed to me as if he had grown pale when he put that question to me. "'No. Have you ever given me the slightest cause to doubt it?'

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She was wearing a little white garment, her lovely hair was negligently tucked up under her bonnet, her breast, whose development had scarcely begun, was hidden beneath two or three folds of gauze, her pretty face had somewhat of pallor owing to the unhappiness consuming her, a few tears rolled from her eyes and lent to them an additional expressiveness... "You observe me, Monsieur," said she to the saintly ecclesiastic... "Yes, you observe me in what for a girl is a most dreadful position; I have lost my father and mother... Heaven has taken them from me at an age when I stand in greatest need of their assistance... They died ruined, Monsieur; we no longer have anything. There," she continued, "is all they left me," and she displayed her dozen louis, "and nowhere to rest my poor head.... You will have pity upon me, Monsieur, will you not? You are Religion's minister and Religion was always my heart's virtue; in the name of that God I adore and whose organ you are, tell me, as if you were a second father unto me, what must I do? what must become of me ?" Chapter 3 The charitable priest clapped an inquisitive eye upon Justine, and made her answer, saying that the parish was heavily loaded; that it could not easily take new charges unto its bosom, but that if Justine wished to serve him, if she were prepared for hard toil, there would always be a crust of bread in his kitchen for her. And as he uttered those words, the gods' interpreter chuck'ed her under the chin; the kiss he gave her bespoke rather too much worldliness for a man of the church, and Justine, who had understood only too well, thrust him away. "Monsieur," said she, "I ask neither alms of you nor a position as your scullion; it was all too recently I took leave of an estate loftier than that which might make those two favors desirable; I am not yet reduced to imploring them; I am soliciting advice whereof my youth and my misfortunes put me in need, and you would have me purchase it at an excessively inflated price." Ashamed thus to have been unmasked, the pastor promptly drove the little creature away, and the unhappy Justine, twice rejected on the first day of her condemnation to isolation, now enters a house above whose door she spies a shingle; she rents a small chamber on the fourth floor, pays in advance for it, and, once established, gives herself over to lamentations all the more bitter because she is sensitive and because her little pride has just been compromised cruelly.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Doubtless it is cruel to have to describe, on the one hand, a host of ills overwhelming a sweet-tempered and sensitive woman who, as best she is able, respects virtue, and, on the other, the affluence of prosperity of those who crush and mortify this same woman. But were there nevertheless some good engendered of the demonstration, would one have to repent of making it? Ought one be sorry for having established a fact whence there resulted, for the wise man who reads to some purpose, so useful a lesson of submission to providential decrees and the fateful warning that it is often to recall us to our duties that Heaven strikes down beside us the person who seems to us best to have fulfilled his own ? Such are the sentiments which are going to direct our labors, and it is in consideration of these intentions that we ask the reader's indulgence for the erroneous doctrines which are to be placed in the mouths of our characters, and for the sometimes rather painful situations which, out of love for truth, we have been obliged to dress before his eyes. Chapter 2 Madame la Comtesse de Lorsange was one of those priestesses of Venus whose fortune is the product of a pretty face and much misconduct, and whose titles, pompous though they are, are not to be found but in the archives of Cythera, forged by the impertinence that seeks, and sustained by the fool's credulity that bestows, them; brunette, a fine figure, eyes of a singular expression, that modish unbelief which, contributing one further spice to the passions, causes those women in whom it is suspected to be sought after that much more diligently; a trifle wicked, unfurnished with any principle, allowing evil to exist in nothing, lacking however that amount of depravation in the heart to have extinguished its sensibility; haughty, libertine; such was Madame de Lorsange. Nevertheless, this woman had received the best education; daughter of a very rich Parisian banker, she had been brought up, together with a sister named Justine, by three years younger than she, in one of the capital's most celebrated abbeys where, until the ages of twelve and fifteen years, the one and the other of the two sisters had been denied no counsels, no masters, no books, and no polite talents. At this period crucial to the virtue of the two maidens, they were in one day made bereft of everything: a frightful bankruptcy precipitated their father into circumstances so cruel that he perished of grief. One month later, his wife followed him into the grave.

• From Between Us

  Research by psychologist Birgit Koopmann-Holm, herself of German descent and living in the United States, suggests that I was projecting the understanding of the situation that would have applied in my (then Dutch) cultural environment onto Hazel. In nicely controlled experiments, Koopman-Holm shows that Germans (and by extension Dutch) see more suffering in ambiguous materials than do their American counterparts. She finds Germans imagine that receiving sympathy focused on negative feelings would be more comforting after a bereavement than receiving sympathy that emphasizes the silver lining. Americans preferred to receive “sympathy” that focuses attention on positive aspects of the situation—cherishing the memories of the deceased. While none of Koopmann-Holm’s studies focuses on conference organizers in a bathroom, it is a safe assumption that my empathizing with Hazel by projecting my own feelings (she must be tired), and focusing on her pain (or fatigue), was of limited value in making connection. I might have been more successful, had I emphasized the silver lining of her fatigue: “Wow, so much work, but the conference is going great!” Mere empathy does not work, because it does not overcome the cultural gap. Yet there are ways of achieving more kindness, and growing closer, which do close the cultural or positional gap. The good news is that you can learn to bridge the cultural differences by unpacking the emotional episode. As a researcher of emotions and as an immigrant myself, I have made my share of mistakes: disbelieving what others told me about their emotions, misinterpreting their behaviors, and projecting my own feelings or interpretations on them. In the end, keeping an open (enough) mind, talking with friends, collaborating with valuable colleagues and informants, reading ethnographies of fieldwork, and living in other places have all helped me better appreciate—perhaps even predict and anticipate—how emotions in other cultural contexts are done. I arrived at this point by asking questions about (and observing) how individuals in other cultures interpreted what happened, what they “wanted” from their relationships, and which responses from the other people in their social worlds they expected or received to their emotions. And most important of all, I relinquished my own assumptions of what the (right) answers to these questions would be. Rather than trying to squeeze my own person under the skin of someone else, I tried to look at the social ripples of emotional episodes in the respective contexts in which they took place. Everyone who has emotional encounters across cultural, or ethnic, or gender boundaries can do the same.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  His wife, Deborah, had disconnected from her parents twice. When she was in her twenties and acting in Dallas, her mother and stepfather broke away from the church. They were close friends of Hana Eltringham, who had stood up for them at their wedding, so when they had doubts about their faith, they went to see her. Eltringham was then counseling people who were considering getting out of Scientology or other new religions. She helped Scientologists confront the contradictions that were implicit in their faith, such as Hubbard speaking of events that had taken place trillions or quadrillions of years in the past, although scientists estimate the age of the universe to be less than 14 billion years, or the fact that it has never been shown that anyone has ever obtained any enhanced OT abilities. Eltringham also talked about the abuses she observed and experienced. “Hana told us how Sea Org members were treated,” Mary Benjamin, Deborah’s mother, recalled, “how they were kept in a basement in Los Angeles and fed rice and beans if they didn’t keep their stats up. How, in the desert, in terrible heat, they would march in a circle for hours.” Like many active members of the church, the Benjamins kept money on account—in their case, $2,500—for future courses they intended to take. Deborah’s mother insisted on getting the money back. Deborah knew what a big deal that was for the church. She didn’t speak to her parents for more than three years, automatically assuming that they must have been declared Suppressive Persons. But when her sister was about to get married, Deborah wrote to the International Justice Chief, the Scientology official in charge of such matters, who said that she was allowed to see her parents as long as they didn’t say anything against Scientology. The Benjamins readily agreed. A decade later, however, Deborah went to Clearwater, intending to take some upper-level courses, and learned that the previous ruling no longer applied. If she wanted to do more training, she would have to confront her parents’ mistakes. The church recommended that she take the Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Persons course. Many Scientologists have taken the same course. Deborah’s friend Kelly Preston had taken it as well. “I was PTS, but I didn’t realize it, and so I was told, ‘You need to be on PTS/SP,’ ” Preston later recalled in her interview for Celebrity magazine. She discovered that her life was full of Suppressive Persons. “Being an artist and having a lot of theta, you really attract those type of people,” Preston said. (“Theta” is a Scientology term for life force.) “I ended up having to handle or disconnect from quite a few different people.” It took Deborah a year to complete the course, but it didn’t change her parents’ status. She petitioned officials at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles for help. They put her on another program that took two more years to finish. Still, nothing changed.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  You’ve got plenty of talent, Stephen; I should be a proud man if you were a writer.’ After which their discussions on the making of books held an even more vital enchantment. But Anna came less and less often to the study, and she would be sitting alone and idle. Puddle, upstairs at work in the schoolroom, might be swatting at her Greek to keep pace with Stephen, but Anna would be sitting with her hands in her lap in the vast drawing-room so beautifully proportioned, so restfully furnished in old polished walnut, so redolent of beeswax and orris root and violets—all alone in its vastness would Anna be sitting, with her white hands folded and idle. A lovely and most comfortable woman she had been, and still was, in spite of her gentle ageing, but not learned, oh, no, very far from learned —that, indeed, was why Sir Philip had loved her, that was why he had found her so infinitely restful, that was why he still loved her after very many years; her simplicity was stronger to hold him than learning. But now Anna went less and less often to the study. It was not that they failed to make her feel welcome, but rather that they could not conceal their deep interest in subjects of which she knew little or nothing. What did she know of or care for the Classics? What interest had she in the works of Erasmus? Her theology needed no erudite discussion, her philosophy consisted of a home swept and garnished, and as for the poets, she liked simple verses; for the rest her poetry lay in her husband. All this she well knew and had no wish to alter, yet lately there had come upon Anna an aching, a tormenting aching that she dared give no name to. It nagged at her heart when she went to that study and saw Sir Philip together with their daughter, and knew that her presence contributed nothing to his happiness when he sat reading to Stephen.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  To inquire about a possible speaking appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit www.prhspeakers.com. Read an excerpt from MR. TEXAS By Lawrence Wright Available from Alfred A. Knopf October 2023 A long cloud of dust trailed the black sedan racing down a caliche road toward the Walter Dunne spread. The horizon was dark and the mesquite trees bent in the north wind, waving at Mexico. A few idle pump jacks were rusting amid the creosote bushes. A slight rise lay just ahead, revealing a low-slung adobe wall encompassing the graveyard. The land was hard, dry, used up. The people who lived in these parts were also hard. Their ancestors settled on giant claims back when there was grass enough for cattle, but generation after generation had seen it wither away. Those who remained on the land were marooned by history. There were no cities within hundreds of miles. The remaining towns were little more than hamlets with half the buildings evacuated like old movie sets. An occasional gas station marked the intersection of county roads, but it was likely abandoned so long ago that the company it represented was extinct as well. You could go for days without seeing another human being, or even hearing your own voice until you had reason to speak. Airliners streaked across the high sky, and from that distant vantage passengers enjoying their cocktails might look down and think, Jeez, what a huge, empty, totally worthless country. And they’d go back to their crossword. You could almost hear the shades snapping shut as they jetted by. The service was already under way when L. D. Sparks parked his Lincoln at the end of a line of pickups and slipped into the crowd of mourners—a respectable turnout, befitting the prominence of the decedent. Some men were in suits but most wore dress jeans and shirts with pearl snap buttons, the women in somber dresses, purchased from catalogs, that reached to their Sunday boots. Their faces were lean and leathery and strongly formed, marked by the sun, faces you rarely saw in the soft suburbs, more like old family photographs, ancestral in nature, plain and unprettified and not to be trifled with. It was the hands that you finally noticed, chapped and red and laced with veins like braided rope, palms as hard as oak, some men could barely make a fist, and when you shook it was like grasping a brick. They were scarred from accidents and animal bites, knuckles broken by obstreperous equipment, some were missing digits. You couldn’t live in these parts without getting hurt. Compared to a lot of folks, Walter Dunne passed into the next world with enviable ease, his heart having failed to keep the beat. The tent over the grave bucked and billowed in the wind.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Then all at once the sound and the choking are gone. I am Senna again. I stare at the wall behind the tap, feeling tired. Isaac grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Please,” he says. “Just try to live.” My eyes are so tired. He picks me up out of the bath. I close my eyes as he kneels on the floor to dry me, then wraps me up in a towel that smells of him. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me to the ladder. I squeeze his neck a little, just so he knows I’ll try. I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No . It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears , my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come? Days, then a week, then two. Isaac gives me the silent treatment. And when there are only two people in the universe, silence is very, very loud. I lurk in his places: the kitchen, the carousel room where he sits against the wall and stares at the horses. I don’t sleep in the attic room anymore; I curl up downstairs on the sofa and wait. Wait for him to wake up, wait for him to look at me, wait for emotions to implode. One night I am sitting at the table … waiting … while he stands at the stove stirring something in a huge cast iron pot. We are running out of food. The freezer has seven plastic bags of indeterminate meat and about four pounds of frozen vegetables. All lima beans, which Isaac hates. The pantry is no less barren looking. We have one sack of potatoes and a two-pound bag of rice. There are some cans of ravioli, but I keep telling myself we will be out of here before I have to eat those.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  The tests and scans started around noon. My first consult was with Dr. Akela, an oncologist Isaac went to medical school with. She was Polynesian and so strikingly beautiful my mouth hung open when she walked in. I could smell fruit on her skin; it reminded me of the bowl Isaac kept filling on my counter. I expelled the smell from my nostrils and breathed through my mouth. She spoke about chemotherapy. Her eyes had a heart and I was under the impression that she was an oncologist because she cared. I hated people who cared. They were prying and nosy and made me feel less human because I didn’t care. After Dr. Akela, I saw a radiation oncologist, and then a plastic surgeon who pressured me to make an appointment to see a grief counselor. I saw Isaac in between each appointment, each scan. He was on his rounds, but he came to walk me to my next appointment. It was awkward. Though each time his white coat emerged, I became a little more familiar with him. It was a weird form of brand recognition—Isaac the Good. His hair was brown, his eyes were deep-set, the bridge of his nose was wide and crooked, but the most telling part of him was his shoulders. They moved first, then the rest of his body followed. I had a tumor on my right breast. Stage II cancer. I was a candidate for a lumpectomy with radiation. Isaac found me in the cafeteria sipping on a cup of coffee, staring out the window. He slid into the chair across from me and watched me watch the rain. “Where is your family, Senna?” Such a hard question. “I have a father in Texas, but we’re not close.” “Friends?” I looked at him. Was he kidding? He had spent every night for a month in my house and my telephone hadn’t rung once. “I don’t have any.” I left off the haven’t you figured that out yet? bit. Dr. Asterholder shifted in his seat like the topic made him uncomfortable, and then, as an afterthought, folded his hands over the crumbs on the tabletop. “You’re going to need a support system. You can’t do this alone.” “Well what would you suggest I do? Import a family?” He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “There might be more than one surgery. Sometimes, even after radiation and chemotherapy, the cancer comes back…” “I’m having a double mastectomy. It’s not going to come back.” I wrote about shock on people’s faces: shock when they find out their love has been cheating on them, shock when they discover faked amnesia—heck, I even wrote about a character who constantly wore a look of shock on his face, even when there was nothing to be shocked about. But I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen true shock before. And here it was, written all over Isaac Asterholder. He dove in immediately, his eyebrows drawing together. “Senna, you don’t—”